I never have quite figured out what should go here as opposed to back on my own blog. I don't post here if I don't think the piece has any outside-academia interest; seems like this space should be a little more geared toward public commentary than toward strictly academic news. So I don't tend to, for example, blog conference announcements here. I'm pretty sure, however, that this one time a conference post is appropriate.
June 2-4, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, there will be a conference on the thought and work of TNR Contributing Editor Michael Walzer, sponsored by the Carnegie Council. The conference lineup includes not only many of the leading political philosophers and political theorists in the field, but also two out of the top three names on TNR's masthead. Walzer is a stimulating and provocative thinker who's written on a very broad range of subjects--and a number of excellent papers have been duly stimulated and provoked, to be presented clustered into panels on "Distributive Justice," "The Interpretive View of Ethics," "The Practice of Social Criticism," "Multiculturalism, Civil Society, and the Politics of Recognition," "The Just War Theory--Moral and Legal Perspectives," "Tradition, Radicalism, and Solidarity," "The Moral Standing of States," and "The Jewish Political Tradition." Panels are free and open to the public, but RSVPs are requested.
--Jacob T. Levy